Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Sometimes I hate writing online because I have a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve, but I want to write a blog to share everything I want people to know about. Maybe these will be personal anecdotes, angry rants, or merely postings of YouTube videos and funny links. Whatever it is, I hope somebody out there reads it.

First up: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/08/gender-segregat.html

This is an interesting article on segregation in K-12 schools. Our country has been hypnotized and obsessed by a widespread belief that there is some kind of problem educating boys in our current public school system and that somehow we have been letting them down. If we have been letting boys down, then I am not seeing those results in standardized testing, colleges, jobs, or even my Psychology 101 class. In fact, the negative bias seems to be leaning in the opposite direction-with girls. There are many, well researched and organized psychological studies that show the effects of implicit stereotyping on the performance of girls in our K-12 school system in comparison to boys. Furthermore, there are even more degradations in performance according to studies performed with students of different ethnicities. What are we going to do then? Segregate our entire public school system into a grid-like structure: Caucasian girls, African-American girls, Native American girls in separate buildings from, Asian boys, Antarctican boys and so on? What ever happened to coexistence? The more we segregate children and the earlier we do it, the more we reinforce stereotypes for better or worse, and the higher the risk of innate inequality becomes in the future.